Talk is cheap if you won't put your name to what you say

24 Sep 2007, ST

By Debbie Yong

I MAY be a rookie reporter, but I already have a pet peeve on the job: anonymity.

Recently, I wrote an article about a news picture sent to Stomp, The Straits Times' online interactive portal for citizen journalism.

The source of one entry, Mr K, had captured what he thought was a molester in action on the MRT. He also wrote about how he hoped his posting would help warn fellow commuters and scare off potential crooks.

Impressed by his initiative and good citizenry, I waxed lyrical to my editor about citizen journalism becoming the moral compass and policing force of the next generation.

Then my bubble burst.

When I called Mr K back for his full name, the once-chatty source clammed up. He refused to reveal his identity despite it being a must for credible news reporting.

Had he a valid reason to withhold his identity, such as for the protection of minors, perhaps I might have understood. But despite my coaxing, he only retorted: 'If you want my name, then I don't want you to publish the article at all.'

What about his original motive of helping others, I asked? What was he afraid of?

'I don't care. The media is unreliable,' was all he said.

I felt betrayed by his cop-out. I also resented his approach, which, unfortunately, is the style of some from the Web generation.

Bloggers and forum users do not hesitate to blame mainstream media for not giving them a voice. But when they do get a platform, some go hush suddenly.

If you believe in something, say it. And if you can say it, why not put your name to it?

The fear of backlash should make you refine your opinion, not cower under pseudonyms and initials.

But despite the rants some of my senior colleagues have against the Web generation, I still believe good can come of it, like 'crowdsourced' journalism, among other things.

The term, coined by American journalist Jeff Howe last June, refers to the speed and mass of the community which can be enlisted in collecting information early in the reporting process.

The professional reporter can then step in later to fill in the structure and verify facts.

But those like Mr K have to come around to the idea first. Just as journalists have bylines to hold them accountable, so too, should citizens who want to make a stand.

Even so, Mr K is not alone. Most people, in fact, are afraid of backlash.

But that is exactly why I love getting a byline. As a new reporter, any feedback - positive or negative - is much appreciated. If there is disagreement, all the better; bring out the coffee, let's discuss it.

Another colleague says citizen journalism will need time to take off.

But why wait when we can start now?

To age gracefully or dye happy?

23 Sep 2007, ST

By Tan Hsueh Yun

YOU know that idle lunch-time conversation stops being idle when it stretches over two days and there's physical violence involved.

That's what happened recently, when one colleague thwacked another on the head for daring to suggest that people who colour their grey hair are being dishonest.

Who knew hair colour could ignite such controversy?

Nobody could remember how we got to talking about it but a heated debate ensued.

The pro-dye camp talked about how hair colour was an expression of individual style, a fashion statement that can perk up a person's looks.

There was also a practical reason for heading to the hair salon: We live in an ageist society and grey hair marks you out as old, faded and invisible.

Hair colour, frivolous as it sounds, might just help you hang on to that job longer and make it less easy for employers to turf you out of the job in favour of someone younger.

But the anti-dye activists went on and on about ageing gracefully. Get real, they said - nobody is going to believe you're young just because you have a head of black or brown hair at age 60 or older. Who are you trying to kid?

They have an ally in writer Anne Kreamer, who wrote a book called Going Gray recently about how she gave up dyeing her hair because she realised it looked artificial. Au naturel, she says, spells candour, authenticity. Oh please, I think she just needed a better colourist.

Still, if you look at those magazine advertisements for American design label Eileen Fisher, some of the older women look sharp and stylish with their short, sassy, salt-and-pepper crops, or soft and feminine with long, snow white hair.

Nobody cares that the actor George Clooney, 46, is greying. Certainly nobody thinks he's less sexy. In fact, the white hair just adds to his foxiness. Nobody thinks that CNN broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper is an old fogey (he's 40) either, just because he has a headful of grey hair.

But they choose not to colour their hair, just as some of us choose to do so.

Someone else at lunch brought up the fact that there are double standards for men and women. Nobody questions it when older women colour their hair. It's part of the beauty regime, he said, something a well-groomed woman would continue doing as part of maintenance.

But men, well, that was another matter altogether. He seemed to think that it would be a terrible faux pas for a guy to be walking around with coloured hair in his dotage.

'Mutton desperately trying to be lamb,' he said.

Then, he added: 'But when do you stop?'

I know what my answer is but we'll get to that later.

Our discussions over those two days made me question why I colour my hair.

The short answer is that I think it's cool. My mother always had highlights in her hair and when school rules no longer held me back, I got some, too.

There were some restless years, when her stylist would slip me vials of temporary hair colour applied with mascara-wands. I could then have wild red or purple streaks in my hair, colour I would wash out when it was time to go back to school on Monday.

So colouring my hair became a routine, like getting regular haircuts and pedicures.

I didn't freak out when I started greying in my 20s. There was no need to because I never had to see the white unless I was tardy with the hair appointments.

Now, I would not dream of stopping.

Am I being dishonest? I don't think so. I don't think I look old enough to have grey hair. Will I be dishonest 20 years from now when I'm still colouring my hair? The answer's No, again.

We are all living longer, taking better care of ourselves by eating better and exercising more. The payoff is that we are feeling younger, longer. If the hair can't get with the programme, I don't see why we can't help it along with some colour.

The anti-dye brigade should also remember that they'll probably still be working well into their 60s, and ask themselves if they can really afford to be the silver head in a sea of brown and black locks.

As for when I'll stop, well, let's just say I've got my colourist on speed dial permanently.

Shyness: overprescribed and over-medicated

22 Sep 2007, ST

By Christopher Lane

FEW children relish the start of a new school year. Most yearn for summer to continue and greet the onset of classes with groans or even dread. But among those who take the longest to adapt and thrive, psychiatrists say, are children trapped in a pathological condition. They are so acutely shy that they are said to suffer 'social anxiety disorder' - an affliction of children and adolescents that, the clinicians argue, is spreading.

It may seem baffling, even bizarre, that ordinary shyness could assume the dimension of a mental disease. But if a youngster is reserved, the odds are high that a psychiatrist will diagnose social anxiety disorder and recommend treatment.

How much credence should we give the diagnosis? Shyness is so common among American children that 42 per cent exhibit it. And, according to one major study, the trait increases with age. By the time they reach college, up to 51 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women describe themselves as shy or introverted. Among graduate students, half of men and 48 per cent of women do. Psychiatrists say that at least one in eight of these people needs medical attention.

But do they? Many parents recognise that shyness varies greatly by situation, and research suggests it can be a benign condition. Just two weeks ago, a study sponsored by Britain's Economic and Social Research Council reported that levels of the stress hormone cortisol are consistently lower in shy children than in their more extroverted peers. The discovery upends the common wisdom among psychiatrists that shyness causes youngsters extreme stress.

Dr Julie Turner-Cobb, the researcher at the University of Bath who led this study, told me the amounts of cortisol suggest that shyness in children 'might not be such a bad thing'.

On what, then, do psychiatrists base their sweeping judgments? Most point to The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders - the fundamental handbook of psychiatry. Yet a glance at the manual reveals that the diagnostic criteria for shyness are far from clear. The third edition, which was published in 1980, said that a person could receive a diagnosis of what was then called 'social phobia' if he was afraid of eating alone in restaurants, avoided public restrooms or was concerned about hand-trembling when writing cheques.

The same guidelines could hardly apply to youngsters heading to kindergarten, children not yet potty-trained and toddlers just learning to eat. So, in 1987, the revised third edition of the manual expanded the list of symptoms by adding anticipated concern about saying the wrong thing - a trait known to just about everyone on the planet.

The diagnostic bar was set so low that even a preschooler could trip over it. Self-help books and magazine articles further widened the definition of social anxiety disorder to include symptoms like test anxiety, aversion to writing on the blackboard and shunning of team sports. These ridiculously loose criteria led to more diagnoses, until social anxiety disorder in children began to look as if it were spreading like the common cold among second-graders.

Then, having alerted the masses to their worrisome avoidance of public restrooms, the psychiatrists needed a remedy. Right on cue, GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, declared in the late 1990s that its antidepressant could also treat social anxiety and, presumably, self-consciousness in restaurants.

Nudged along by a public-awareness campaign, social anxiety quickly became the third most-diagnosed mental illness in the country, behind only depression and alcoholism.

This diagnosis was frequently irresponsible, and it also had human costs.

After being prescribed Paxil or Zoloft for their shyness and public-speaking anxiety, a disturbingly large number of children, studies found, began to contemplate suicide and to suffer a host of other chronic side effects. This class of antidepressants, known as SSRIs, had never been tested on children. Belatedly, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to require a 'black box' warning on the drug label, cautioning doctors and parents that the drugs may be linked to suicide risk in young people.

You might think the spectre of children on suicide watch from taking remedies for shyness would end any impulse to overprescribe them. Yet the tendency to use potent drugs to treat run-of-the-mill behaviours persists.

The recent book Nurturing The Shy Child: Practical Help For Raising Confident And Socially Skilled Kids And Teens insists: 'Do not be afraid to try medication.'

'When an SSRI is properly prescribed and monitored, medication can be very helpful,' say the authors, two psychologists. This book says it is a sign of social anxiety disorder if a child complains about or tries to avoid asking the teacher a question or getting up from his or her desk to sharpen a pencil.

Clearly, there is a need to reconsider the diagnostic standards. A team of mental health experts has recently gathered to oversee a new edition of The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual, and this time they should make sure to carefully distinguish normal - even healthy - shyness from social anxiety disorder. They should also remove shyness from the lists of symptoms of avoidant personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder.

With so much else to worry about, psychiatry would be wise to give up its fixation on a childhood trait as ordinary as shyness.

Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern, is the author of the forthcoming Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness.

Think before sending off that pesky e-mail

22 Sep 2007, ST

By Janice Tay

WARNING: This column may upset you.

Though if you have to handle queries of any kind, it may strike a painfully resonant chord instead.

I'm always delighted to get a message from a reader and sometimes when I open the e-mail, the delight becomes pure happiness. But there are also times when I am...perturbed.

Here's a composite of those messages: 'hi, will be going to osaka for hols next month and want to stay in an inn in kyoto. please give detailed instructions on how to get to kyoto from osaka, how to book ryokan room and idea of how much it costs. what should i eat? see? buy?

'also keen on stdying in japan as am intrestd in the japs. can give me names of some schools? tks'

Certain thoughts come to mind: Does the writer have a religious objection to capital letters? Is he afraid of spelling words out in full? Of complete sentences? And did somebody shut down the Internet while I wasn't looking?

Even setting aside the issue of calling the Japanese 'japs', messages like that disturb me on a number of levels.

I love e-mail but I sometimes wonder if it's made things a bit too easy. If you have to look for paper, write or type on it, then find an envelope, stamp and postbox, chances are, you'd take more care with what actually went into the letter because it'd be a waste of the trouble otherwise.

When you use something that needs as little time and effort as e-mail, the temptation is to write without taking either.

But the result is like a stranger walking into your home dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and wearing slippers he doesn't remove. He then puts his slippered feet up on your coffee table and demands a drink.

Living in Japan can be a constant education in how your actions affect others. A few months ago, I signed up for a class meant to introduce students to business Japanese.

But we found ourselves studying more than language. We learnt the protocol involved in sitting in a room or car, the right time to call another company (not 9am as many businesses start the day with a short meeting) and the 'respectful' way to seal an envelope (with glue rather than tape, which looks unsightly).

Some may say that this hyper-sensitivity to what others think is the result of a group culture gone overboard. They may point out that the care taken comes not from genuine consideration but a fear of ostracism.

While this seems to be true in some cases, it's still worth thinking about exactly what you are doing when you approach another person - and the possible responses.

For this reason, I've debated for months whether or not to tackle this subject because I know it will upset some of those who have written to me.

'Geez,' they may say, 'It was just an e-mail.'

Was it?

There's another issue here quite apart from the writing style: The ease with which some people will ask a stranger for information readily available elsewhere.

Almost everything I found out about Japan before moving to Kyoto, I learnt by using nothing more complicated than books, television and the Internet.

If you really don't know where to start, try Kinokuniya. Those on a tight budget can look in the bookshop for something helpful, then check if the National Library carries the title.

As for information on studying in Japan, I got that from the Internet, not the secret files of the CIA.

But why am I so reluctant to share this information with strangers? First, the many, many things staring at me as they wait to be done.

Second, to make a recommendation is to take responsibility for the experience another person will have. I prefer to do it only for people I know or if what I'm recommending looks like a sure-fire winner.

There's another reason: The knowledge that by answering those kinds of e-mail, I'm compounding an unhelpful habit.

Every time we want to know something, we slide into our own pattern of asking questions and finding answers. We form this habit as children, taking it unconsciously into adulthood.

If not for this column, I might not have thought so hard about how I move from Q to A. I see now that while I enjoyed school on the whole, it was an environment where questions were seldom voiced.

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing; I just got into the habit of finding my own answers. This meant reading, watching and listening - and thinking about what I'd read, seen and heard.

I might not have got the best answer but I usually came up with something.

Sometimes I'd get lazy and bother my friends before doing anything on my own. In return, I'd try to help if one of them came to me with a question.

But here's the thing: I am not a friend to most of the people reading this column. I am also not a travel agent or education consultant. And I most certainly am not Google. For a start, I'm a lot shorter.

It's cold comfort to know that journalists and other columnists also find themselves in my position. And reading the FAQ section of authors' websites, it's hard not to see a hint of exasperation at times.

Even British writer Neil Gaiman, reckoned to be one of the nicest human beings on the planet (and not just by his fans), felt the need to put this on his website: 'Please don't try to use the FAQ submission area for help with your homework ...I won't do your homework for you. Just pretend I'm a dead author and in no position to answer your questions.'

If you believe that it's good to have questions, then don't be in such a hurry to give them to someone else.

There's a university lecture I still think about years after I attended it. It's not the content I remember but what the professor said as she gave out stacks of notes.

Students, she remarked, had come to expect such photocopies as a right. But it was interesting, she said, that this kind of information had the same name as the things given as charity: handouts.

There's a difference between help and charity - when you ask for something, which are you asking for?

One e-mail I received didn't ask for either. It was from a reader who just wanted to say that, like me, he'd quit a good job to pursue his interests and was 'hyped up' to see another person doing it.

He didn't come looking for answers from a stranger because he'd already found them by himself.

And when I read his e-mail, delight shot into pure happiness.

The writer, a former sub-editor with The Straits Times, is studying Japanese in Kyoto.

Alex Man out as Star Search judge?

21 Sep 2007, ST

While the Hong Kong actor's scores have been fair, his comments have not been satisfactory, says MediaCorp

By Lee Sze Yong

FOR the past three weeks, Hong Kong actor Alex Man has been booting out contestants of Channel 8's talent hunt Star Search as one of the judges.

Now, he may be getting the sack himself.


MAN, OH, MAN: Man's (above) behaviour offscreen, like his off-colour remarks to show host Quan Yifeng, have also ruffled feathers. -- PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO

Reports have surfaced that the 50-year-old veteran, who has been in more than 70 movies and even more TV serials, including local production Golden Pillow (1996), may be replaced after displaying questionable behaviour on and off the air.

The show's managing executive producer Tan Puay Keem told Life! yesterday that the production team is holding meetings to 'evaluate his performance'.

She said: 'To be honest, there is a gap between his performance on air and what we had expected of him when we invited him on the panel.'

Man, who sits on the panel with MediaCorp Studios' senior vice-president for Chinese drama Kok Len Shoong and Taiwanese actress Ann Lang Tsu-yun from the first episode aired on Aug 21, has been criticised for giving vague reviews of the contestants' performances.

Tan said that while his scores for each contestant have been fair, his comments have been unsatisfactory.

'Times have changed. Being a judge on a live show is not that easy. His experience as an actor may not help him in this case.'

She added that the decision on whether Man would stay or leave depends largely on TV viewers.

'Ultimately, we are producing a show for the viewers. If it has come to a point when they can't accept him, then we may have to do something drastic.'

Already, some viewers have gone to online forums and the Chinese media to say that his comments for the contestants have been ambiguous and not pointed enough.

Efforts to reach the actor have been unsuccessful.

However, talk that he may be replaced by Hong Kong actor-director Alfred Cheung is untrue.

A Channel 8 spokesman clarified that Cheung would be a fourth judge as the contest goes into the semi-finals next week, and is not a replacement.

Off-screen, Man's actions have led to unhappiness on the set. A disgruntled source on the set has also told on him to Lianhe Zaobao.

Among the complaints:

# At a rehearsal for the pilot episode, Man, Lang and Kok went on stage to be introduced by the hosts and were to go back to their seats on their own.

But Man shouted: 'How come nobody is escorting us down? Do you take me for an extra? I'm a Golden Horse winner.'

When told that he would not be filmed going off-stage, the 1988 winner for Best Actor for mafia film Call Me Brother in the Taiwanese film awards stood his ground until producers assigned someone to escort the judges to their seats.

# At a recording of the second episode, Man took out of his bag a pair of binoculars, a camera, a video camera and other equipment, and started shooting away at the hosts and contestants. Crew members asked him to keep his things, to no avail.

Commenting on the incidents, Tan said that it is not unusual for a celebrity to have 'some attitude'.

'It would be a godsend if celebrities are articulate, witty, experienced and cooperative, all in one,' she remarked with a laugh.

She said that Man 'would ask for feedback after each recording so you know that he is trying' to improve.

However, his off-colour comments to hosts Quan Yifeng and Guo Liang during a filming break had the former fuming.

The actor apparently said to Quan and Guo, who are married to other people: 'All these years, you've never got together? You've never got it on?'

The hosts seemed shocked by his questions but Man went on to suggest that Quan should host an adult show with him in China.

An unhappy Quan fired off a post on her blog on Sept 15 but stopped short of naming Man. She wrote: 'As a woman, as a female artiste, as a wife, as a mother, these words were extremely insulting.'

She added: 'Thanks very much. I'm not so cheap that I have to do an adult show to survive.'

She also wrote: 'I act dumb in the face of weekly sexual harassment not because I'm permissive but because I'm soft-hearted. I don't want to see an old, conceited 'clown' completely lose face in public.'

Later, after a recording on Tuesday, she declined to comment further to reporters except to say: 'What you've seen is a reflection of my feelings.'

When asked if the tension between Quan and Man will affect production, Tan said that Quan has been treating this professionally and has not shown any displeasure on the show.

She added: 'They may not be friends but they can still be colleagues.'

---------------------------------

Quan Yi Fong Blog

Go online to help search for missing adventurer

12 Sep 2007, ST

Netizens are asked to trawl through satellite images for signs of millionaire Fossett

WASHINGTON - INTERNET users have been asked to join what is being billed as the world's largest search for a missing person: a frame-by-frame trawl through tens of thousands of satellite images for signs of missing adventurer Steve Fossett.

Millionaire Fossett, 63, has not been heard from since Sept 3, when he failed to return after taking off in a single-engine aircraft from a ranch in Nevada. He had been trying to find a suitable site for an attempt at a world land-speed record.

An aviation website, www.avweb.com, is providing links for people to review fresh satellite images, plus instructions on how to look for Mr Fossett's plane or any image that might resemble a small aircraft. The images are provided by DigitalGlobe, the company that supplies images to Google Earth.

After being shown a satellite image, viewers will be asked to check one of two boxes.

HOW TO HELP: Users are asked to review the satellite images and alert the website hosting these images if they spot any object that may resemble a small aircraft. Mr Fossett was last seen flying a single-engine aircraft.

One says the image 'contains foreign objects that should be looked at more closely'. Viewers will then be asked to describe them. The other box says the image contains nothing of interest.

'This is kind of a new thing for us,' said Civil Air Patrol spokesman Cynthia Ryan.

She said every Google-generated tip is reviewed and the best ones passed on to pilots. So far, there have been several false sightings of Mr Fossett's airplane.

Mr Fossett is described as an expert survivalist, but hopes of finding him alive are fading fast as his plane had disappeared in a huge area.

False leads and frustration dogged the hunt at the weekend. It is hoped that allowing Internet users to trawl though satellite images of the area available online may provide new leads in the search.

A private search effort is also in progress, being driven in part by hotel magnate Barron Hilton, who has opened the airstrip at his Flying-M Ranch to private search planes and helicopters. Mr Fossett took off from the ranch's runway more than a week ago.

While the private search party has worked side by side with the government during the eight-day hunt, officials said they are becoming worried that the latest call for volunteers could bring in people who are unfamiliar with the vast and often dangerous landscape.

'It has not been condoned, nor is it necessarily helpful to the law enforcement community,' Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford said on Sunday. 'We don't want searchers to have to go out to look for searchers.'

Major Ryan said the search, which now covers about 44,000 sq km - an area as big as the Malaysian states of Pahang and Selangor - will continue indefinitely.

The effort will stop when searchers have 'exhausted every square inch, and we aren't even close to that', she said.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LUCIANO PAVAROTTI: Rock of Opera

11 Sep 2007, ST

By David Hajdu

ON SEPT 13, 1994, Luciano Pavarotti and Bryan Adams stood side by side before a symphony orchestra assembled on a vast outdoor stage in Modena, Italy, the opera singer's home town, and they performed a duet of O Sole Mio.



Pavarotti, beaming, sang the hoary old heart-stopper beautifully, almost as if he had not done it several jillion times before. Adams croaked and giggled and clutched the microphone in palpable terror.

The performance, which was televised internationally and later released on video, survives on YouTube. Watching it now, in the wake of Pavarotti's death from pancreatic cancer last week, one can only marvel at the incongruity of the scene and wonder what in the world was that rock star doing in the company of that guy Adams?

Luciano Pavarotti was, among many things - perhaps above all - a rock star, regardless of the fact that the music he sang happened to be opera or, on occasion, folk or popular music in the operatic mode. To recognise this is not to deny his profound gifts as an artist or to diminish his importance as the most beloved tenor of the post-war era.

He was blessed with a stunningly gorgeous voice, pure yet unmistakable, which he employed with ardour in the service of beauty and joy. He brought countless listeners, including this one, to rapture.

In addition, as waves of encomiums in recent days have reminded us, his enormous appeal gave Pavarotti an evangelical dimension. More than anyone since Enrico Caruso, we are repeatedly told, Pavarotti brought opera to the masses. This is true, but not the whole truth: More than anything, what Pavarotti did was bring mass culture - particularly the sensibility of the rock 'n' roll age - to the world of opera.

He came to see his work as a mission of outreach. In this, he was carrying on a tradition as old as opera itself. Performers, promoters and civic leaders have worked for centuries to connect opera with the populace.

In the American Old West, every frontier town worth its tumbleweed erected an opera house between the Wells Fargo station and the saloon. In the early 20th century, every vaudeville bill had a 'class' act - a soprano or a vocal duo who would sing excerpts from an aria or two between the magicians and the jugglers.

Pavarotti, following the lead of his hard-driving, open-eyed manager Herbert Breslin, veered away from full-scale operas in traditional halls and branched into the recital business, where his buoyant personality could flourish and his indifference to acting and his reluctance to learn new roles would not be significant liabilities.

Breslin pushed him into the mould of rock stardom, and he fit nicely. Pavarotti was the first opera star to be booked in Madison Square Garden in New York City, and he became an arena attraction, the aria Elvis. He played Vegas; he did The Tonight Show, the American late-night talk show; he was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live; he starred in a Hollywood movie, Yes, Giorgio.

Although the singer and manager parted ways acrimoniously, Pavarotti stayed for the rest of his career in the mould set by Breslin. He expanded his audience through his arena tours with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, and through a series of concerts with rock and pop singers, including James Brown, Elton John, Celine Dion, Meat Loaf and the Spice Girls, not to mention Bryan Adams.

What was it about Pavarotti that made him so popular among people who otherwise showed no special affection for opera? He had a peasant quality that made up for his performing an art usually associated with a cultured elite. He had a robust earthiness that signified authenticity. Pavarotti, who never mastered reading music, was a largely intuitive musician, and that seemed to come across to his advantage.

He was, if not larger than life, larger in size than most humans. Indeed, he was practically the embodiment of an opera-hater's parody conception of a male opera singer - so huge he could hardly support his own weight, robustly Italian, blustering, flamboyant and oddly child-like.

With his heavy beard and long, wavy hair, his enormous eyebrows permanently cocked in seeming puzzlement, and his habitually broken English, Pavarotti seemed almost like a character from a Warner Brothers cartoon come to life, ready to sing a chorus of Kill The Wabbit! All these, I suspect, may well have helped him endear himself to a public inured to pop stars who look and act very much like cartoons and self-parodies.

Never much disposed to the acting side of opera, Pavarotti learnt in time to play Pavarotti, regardless of the character he was supposed to be. He drew from his own personality, like a popular singer, and his sensibility was exuberant, boyish, inclined to emotional extremes, and not very reflective.

The kind of opera he gave us was, on the whole, a music of voluptuous emotion, little darkness and not much thought. There was melodrama but little drama; there were outcries of pain, but scarcely any doubt, no melancholia.

The opera of Pavarotti was always thrilling and rarely challenging. It was something less than opera in the fullness of its dramatic potential. Still, it had a beauty that was practically unnatural in its perfection. It always made me happy, and it was grand, like the man who made it.

The writer, author of Lush Life and Positively Fourth Street, is the music critic for The New Republic magazine.

Through the virtual looking glass

09 Sep 2007, ST

By Colin Goh

ASKED the Wife, looking over my shoulder at my laptop screen: 'Who are all these people poking you?'

Now, there are contexts in which being asked such a question by one's spouse could land one in serious trouble. Thankfully, she was only referring to the list of people poking me (virtually) on Facebook.

Okay, I know that to some of my older readers (hi Mum, hi Dad!), the preceding sentence must have seemed like complete gobbledygook. And just a few weeks ago, I would have regarded it as gibberish, too.

Facebook, as probably every young person in Singapore knows, is a website where users post information about themselves such as their photos, lists of their favourite movies, upcoming events, and short sentences about what they're doing right now. They then link their page to those of their 'friends', thus creating a social network.

In some ways, Facebook heralds the decline of the blog generation. Who really cares about one's meandering opinions on current affairs? By being part social network, part online scrapbook, Facebook brings out both one's inner narcissist and inner kaypoh at the same time - the two dominant impulses of all surfers.

I'd studiously avoided joining these social networking sites for the past two years or so, whether it was LinkedIn, MySpace or any number of corporate/professional equivalents, despite constantly being invited. They just seemed too deliberate to me. I always felt like I was at some e-schmoozefest, handing out virtual namecards and making cyber small talk.

But I was forced to join Facebook recently because only then could I view some photos my cousin had uploaded. I dutifully filled out the information (I still don't know why - ever the good Singaporean, I guess) and even uploaded a photo of myself, and next thing I knew, I was a user.

And it was fascinating. Because I soon found out that there were so many people I knew who were users, too - people my age, not just teens - and who had been merrily posting selected details of their lives online. Facebook didn't seem as schmoozy as the professional networking sites, as most of the activities were informal, if not downright bizarre.

My 'friends' were transforming themselves into zombies and biting each other. I'd get notifications that so-and-so had thrown a sheep at such-and-such. Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage bought me a virtual drink (thanks, Alvin, it was virtually refreshing), while others invited me to join causes which ranged from 'Support Independent Film' to 'Bush Haters Unite'.

And, of course, there was the 'poke' function, which is like some form of virtual nudge to get another's attention. 'Poke', of course, is a term with sexual connotations, and I'm very lucky the Wife is extremely broad-minded. (I learnt from Wikipedia that some do construe the 'poke' as a sexual advance, and that there's now a Facebook group called 'Enough with the Poking, Let's Just Have Sex,' which has over 200,000 members.)

'Does being poked make someone a Pokemon?' I asked the Wife, only half in jest. Because whatever we were all doing on Facebook seemed like some sort of weird game, and the players a cutesy, wacky, cartoonish version of ourselves, from the pithy updates we'd post about what we're doing at any given point in time, to the virtual toys we'd give each other.

Of course, sometimes, real world considerations can creep in. What if that annoying jerk you've been trying to avoid since secondary school, or worse, your psycho ex-girlfriend, sends you a 'friend' request? Will you deny it? Just leave it hanging there in your sidebar to be reminded of it each time you log on?

Or will you be a better person in cyberspace than you are in real life and just accept them, letting bygones be bygones? After all, many of us are certainly pretending to be wittier, cooler, and smarter versions of ourselves online, just by judiciously editing what we choose to share or not.

I don't know. When the Web first arose, many wrote about how it would make it more difficult to hide secrets, and in some ways this is true. But it has also made it easier to fabricate stuff about ourselves too - to the point where we even inhabit whole other personas and existences, whether on our blogs or on sites like Facebook and Second Life.

I know that even in 'real' life, we're selective about what we want to project, too. But this impulse seems heightened online, and I often wonder, when we encounter each other, how much of the real person we're actually glimpsing, or if, with all the picking and choosing, all we're seeing is our very own Pikachu.

Private battle with demons

30 Aug 2007, ST

By James Martin

THE stunning revelations contained in a new book, which show that Mother Teresa had doubted God's existence, will delight her detractors and confuse her admirers. Or is it the other way around?

The private journals and letters of the woman now known as Blessed Teresa of Kolkata will be released next month as Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, and some excerpts have been published in Time magazine.

The pious title of the book, however, is misleading. Most of its pages reveal not the serene meditations of a Catholic sister confident in her belief, but the agonised words of a person confronting a terrifying period of darkness that lasted for decades.

'In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,' she wrote in 1959, 'of God not wanting me - of God not being God - of God not existing.' According to the book, this inner turmoil, known to only a handful of her closest colleagues, lasted until her death in 1997.

Gleeful detractors may point to this as yet another example of the hypocrisy of organised religion. The woman widely known in her lifetime as a 'living saint' apparently did not even believe in God.

But it was not always so. In 1946, Mother Teresa, then 36, was hard at work in a girls' school in Kolkata when she fell ill. On a train ride en route to some rest in Darjeeling, she had heard what she would later call a 'voice' asking her to work with the poorest of the poor, and experienced a profound sense of God's presence.

A few years later, however, after founding the Missionaries of Charity and beginning her work with the poor, darkness descended on her inner life. In 1957, she wrote to the archbishop of Kolkata about her struggles, saying: 'I find no words to express the depths of the darkness.'

But to conclude that Mother Teresa was a crypto-atheist is to misread both the woman and the experience that she was forced to undergo.

Even the most sophisticated believers sometimes believe that the saints enjoyed a stress-free spiritual life - suffering little personal doubt. For many saints this is accurate: St Francis de Sales, the 17th-century author of An Introduction To The Devout Life, said that he never went more than 15 minutes without being aware of God's presence.

Yet the opposite experience is so common it even has a name. St John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic, labelled it the 'dark night', the time when a person feels completely abandoned by God, and which can lead even the most ardent of believers to doubt God's existence.

During her final illness, St Therese of Lisieux, the 19th-century French Carmelite nun who is now widely revered as 'The Little Flower', faced a similar trial, which seemed to centre on doubts about whether anything awaited her after death.

'If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into,' she said to the sisters in her convent. But Mother Teresa's 'dark night' was of a different magnitude, lasting for decades. It is almost unparalleled in the lives of the saints.

In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily.

In this way she hoped to enter, in her words, the 'dark holes' of the lives of the people with whom she worked. Paradoxically, then, Mother Teresa's doubt may have contributed to the efficacy of one of the more notable faith-based initiatives of the past century.

Few of us, even the most devout believers, are willing to leave everything behind to serve the poor. Consequently, Mother Teresa's work can seem far removed from our daily lives. Yet in its relentless and even obsessive questioning, her life intersects with that of the modern atheist and agnostic.

'If I ever become a saint,' she wrote, 'I will surely be one of 'darkness'.'

Mother Teresa's ministry with the poor won her the Nobel Peace Prize and the admiration of a believing world. Her ministry to a doubting modern world may have only just begun.

The writer is a Jesuit priest and the author of My Life With The Saints.

Miss Teen USA hopeful's answer on Americans' bad grasp of geography becomes joke on Net

30 Aug 2007, New Paper

BY her own admission, Miss Lauren Caitlin Upton (left) joined beauty pageants to improve her personal communication skills.

But if her performance at last Friday's Miss Teen USA competition is anything to go by, she's going to need a lot more practice.

During the question and answer segment, Miss Upton, who represented South Carolina, tripped up spectacularly when she offered a meandering, ungrammatical and incoherent answer that turned her into a national joke.

PUT ON THE SPOT

The 18-year-old was put on the spot by pageant judge Aimee Teergarden, who asked her: 'Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?'

Miss Upton replied: 'I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps.



'And, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the US should help the US, er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.'

Still, Miss Upton ended coming in fourth in the competition, which was won by Miss Teen Colorado Hilary Carol Cruz.

And although the pageant has ended, her ordeal continues.

The video of her humiliating moment has since been posted on video-sharing site YouTube, and has attracted more than three million viewers.

The video also drew scathing comments from viewers, such as 'sharp as a beachball, this one', and 'she'll probably make millions as America's stupidest blonde'.

Pageant host Mario Lopez later told People Magazine that he wanted to help Miss Upton, but had strict instructions not to talk to the contestants while they were answering.

'You don't know what the question is until you get up there. And I believe that she misunderstood it.'

To be sure, the Lexington High School graduate is no dummy.

She was an honours student who graduated with a 3.5 grade-point average, and was also a varsity athlete and student leader.

As for her meltdown, she said: 'I seriously think I only heard about one or two words of the actual question.'

But she redeemed herself on the show when Today interviewer Matt Lauer offered her another go.



'My friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don't know anyone else who doesn't. And if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography.'

Camera phone? Tech dino says no

20 Aug 2007, ST

Men are supposed to be gadget lovers, but it's tedious to keep up with frivolous new inventions

By Teo Cheng Wee, Our Columnist

ABOUT a month ago, I whipped out a new mobile phone that I had bought, to several rounds of applause from friends and colleagues.

I would have liked to say that they clapped in sheer excitement because I got the latest, most coveted model on the market, but sadly they put their hands together more in relief than anything else.

Relief because my last mobile phone looked like it had been dragged through landmines in Sarajevo and then trampled on in a Pamplona bull run.

A relic from the Stone Age - in other words, two years ago - there were scratch marks all around its shell, its light blue colour was peeling and the soft power button had been pressed so many times that a huge dent had been made, so deep that I could no longer turn on the phone without the help of a pointed object.

The phone had caused me no small amount of embarrassment, especially when it goes off and people give me the 'what, you still have a polyphonic ringtone' look (as opposed to the MP3 ones everyone has these days).

I sometimes try to shoot back an 'oh yeah, but Brad Pitt's phone in Ocean's 13 also had a polyphonic ringtone' stare, but that is usually too complicated for anyone to understand.

On a recent visit to an army camp for an assignment, I almost felt embarrassed to be the only person who didn't have to surrender his camera-less, MP3 player-less mobile phone to the guardhouse.

I tell everyone that I resisted buying a phone for the longest time because first, my old one was still working and second, none of the new phones out there caught my eye.

But deep down inside I knew the real reason was that I hated having to learn all this new technology that would inevitably accompany my latest phone.

When you are someone who changes his mobile phone once every two years or more, you are always left standing what appears to be light years behind everyone else. It's incredible how quickly new technology like Bluetooth or Blackberry can leave you blue and black from ignorance.

Everyone says men are supposed to be tech-savvy gadget lovers, but in this increasingly high-tech world, I'm probably one of the most low-tech guys around.

I can understand the appeal of having new toys - I was quite excited to finally be able to load funky wallpapers and a whole list of MP3 songs onto my new phone.

But when I got home, I realised the USB cable I needed to do this didn't come with the phone. Then I found out that what I thought was a memory card was actually a memory card adaptor.

This tech dino - as one of my friend so cheerfully calls me - didn't realise it at the mobile phone shop because none of these, you see, were essential in 2005.

With only two stock wallpapers and 10 jarring ringtones on my chunky new phone - and no time to go shopping for USB cables or memory cards - I actually preferred sticking to my old one.

So the new boy went into the drawer and there it stayed for four months (the aforementioned applause from my friends usually dies down sharply at this point when I relate the story).

It's times like this that I worry about turning into an old fuddy duddy when I'm only 28.

After all, it was just a decade ago that I embraced the Internet age with open arms. I still remember the excitement of getting my first PlayStation and, more recently, my iPod.

Have I really aged that fast in the working world?

But after thinking it through, I believe my diffidence and resistance is not directed towards the technology, but its usage.

Having information at your fingertips through the World Wide Web, sending money halfway around the globe with a click of a mouse, or having music on the go in a device the size of two matchboxes - now these are technological improvements worth having and learning about.

But having a camera in a phone so you can take pictures of any and every inconsequential object, like so many people do?

Allowing it to play music so you can irritate the hell out of other commuters on the MRT? Or joining Friendster so you can start competing to see who collects 10,000 friends first?

Some newfangled fads just seem so painfully frivolous.

And it irks me to have to keep up with all these tiresome inventions when they appear to do no more than add clutter to an already chaotic modern life.

Indeed, as luck would have it, barely one month after I started using my new phone, I had problems hearing people on the other line.

When I sent the phone for servicing, they told me that the cover was damaged, but couldn't explain why.

Was it something I did? Should I be more careful with it next time, I asked the technician.

His unsatisfactory answer: Don't know. Sometimes this just happens.

Well, I'm glad there was something reliable on standby that I could depend on for three days when I had to leave the new phone with the workshop.

That's right. My old scratched-up, battle-scarred, camera-less phone.

And I'm grateful that it was there for me - warts, polyphonic ringtones and all.

Spit? Spat!

19 Aug 2007, ST

While there is a lot of ranting online, why is voicing your thoughts without the cloak of anonymity bound to raise hackles?

By Cheong Suk-Wai

IN THE past week, I have been thinking a lot about a girl in the rain from my childhood.

I remember her because it seems I was the only one among her schoolmates to stop and ask her one day why she, all of seven years, was standing in the middle of our school field as a drizzle turned into a downpour.

I was nine then, but couldn't tell whether the streaks down her face were from raindrops, or her tears, but I did know what my mother would say if she found me like so.

'You will catch cold and fall ill,' I told her, parroting my Mum. 'I'd better take you back to class now.'

She refused to budge.

But after some prodding on my part - and possibly to get rid of me - she told me that two prefects had ordered her out into the field because she was always late for school.

Hmmm, I thought, I'm quite sure risking being hit by lightning in a thunderstorm was not the penalty for tardiness.

And I knew the girl to be among the clutch of kids from the rubber estates ringing outside my town who cycled about 5km to school every morning, usually on empty stomachs. (It was my father, whose job included inspecting said estates, who had told me this, not the girl.)

The girl went on to name the two prefects, who were my seniors, and who both had mothers who taught in my school.

Now, you would think, that should have been enough to deter me from marching to my headmistress' office and demanding that something be done about the big bullies, right?

Well, I admit I did pause to think - but only because I wasn't exactly the pet of Mrs H, my headmistress. I had been stupid enough to argue with her some weeks before when, as I was reading from my primer about Brer Rabbit, she corrected my pronunciation of the word 'lettuce' (I always said 'lattice') to 'let-tews'.

'LET-tews, LET-tews, LET-tews, silly girl,' she admonished.

'But,' I protested, 'my father says it's 'lattice'. And can't we say it both ways, Mrs H? 'Cos 'flour' can be 'flarh' or 'flower', right?'

She went quiet at this, and I 'lattice'-ed on regardless.

So, there I was in Mrs H's office, dripping with rain myself and protesting hotly that students should not be bullied even if they had broken school rules. (Yes, I was quite the lawyer buruk.)

She summoned the two prefects, whose scowls at me meant that I had better watch my back from now on, and made the girl come in from the rain.

The confrontation ended quickly enough, with Mrs H deciding that if the girl in the rain was not complaining, there was no proof that the two prefects had put her out there in the first place.

She also asked the prefects to warn all their ilk that if they made their schoolmates stand in the rain from now on, they would have to stand in the rain with them too.

That's it? I thought then, dragging my feet out of Mrs H's office. That's all?

Oh boy, I decided. I had a lot of growing up to do.

I STILL do, as it turns out.

Recently, I have learnt that a person whom I considered a friend had blackmarked me to people I care about because I have apparently committed a slew of inexcusable social boo-boos.

Thing is, the person did so without telling me why my boo-boos were considered boo-boos in the first place, let alone checking with me first why I had apparently meant to offend her (I hadn't, really).

Permit me to leave out the details of the spat, but suffice to say, it was a clear case of pot calling the kettle black.

My one big mistake was to complain long and loud to my circle of friends about how black The Kettle's deeds seemed to be.

I spat it out thinking that everyone should be used to people thinking out loud by now, what with all the soul-baring and bitching that is rife in cyberspace these days.

Apparently not, as it turns out, because what followed was that most people I knew thought The Kettle right and that The Pot (me) was as black as black can be. (Shameful I know.)

Doubtless, I had broken one of humanity's biggest unspoken rules - never complain, never explain, the point being that if you had to choose between hurting a person's feelings and easing up on your principles, it is better not to hurt a person's feelings.

But how is it I was the only one being chastised?

'Take it easy,' a good friend e-mailed me, signing off with a smiley to cheer me up.

'Don't carry a bag of rotting potatoes,' went another cautionary e-mail, putrid potatoes being a metaphor for the burden of hatred. 'Love a person even if you don't like him or her anymore.'

Two other friends took me to lunch and dinner respectively, hearing me out over long hours and reminding me that people hate only because they fear. Too true.

Usually, I would just let things be. The truth will out some day, I'd say, brushing things off, not realising that, by doing so, I was not respecting myself (so why would others?).

But, somehow, for once I didn't want to be like my schoolmate, standing in the middle of the field in the rain.

So, last Tuesday, The Pot called The Kettle up and had the long talk we should have had well before our bags of emotionally rotten potatoes began to stink.

As human nature goes, we have agreed to disagree, although I doubt we will move on very far.

Still, peace has settled in my heart because, by letting The Kettle know I understood and forgave the fear, at least I have come in from the rain.

DO THE EYES HAVE IT?

15 Aug 2007, New Paper

IF these eyes intrigue or scare you, you're not alone. You have much of humanity for company.

Millions have looked into these eyes, in times of revolution and war, and trembled like little sheep.

Never mind if it was out of awe or fear. They followed, to victory or to doom.

Just what makes a leader? Sure, a nice suit helps.

But it's also about the eyes. Yes, the windows to the soul.

Leaders have a certain fire in their eyes, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said last week, when asked about finding Singapore's next generation of leaders at the Pioneers of Singapore: Inside Stories seminar.

He used the analogy of the sheepdog and talked about its ability to scare sheep into obedience by staring at them.

He said: 'I went to a sheepdog exhibition in Australia and the chap with the whistle, he had three sheepdogs and he could get a whole flock of sheep corralled, brought down, put into the pen.

'So we asked him, 'How do you train the dog?' He said, 'We have a way of doing this, but you must first decide whether that dog can do this job.'

'I said, 'How do you do it?'

'He said, 'Look at his eyes, look at his pedigree. If the dog hasn't got the eyes that will look into a sheep and scare the sheep into doing this, don't try.'

But what is this so-called 'fire in the eyes'?

Is it a myth or a real way to spot leadership?

The laymen would call it passion, gravitas, the X-factor - 'that elusive spark'.

The psychologist, more helpfully perhaps, will tell you it all boils down to the pupils.

'Your pupils contract when you are angry. They dilate, or get bigger, when you are excited,' said Dr Elizabeth Nair, 57.

'People follow, based on fear or attraction.'

Americans, coming from the land of free-world legends like Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, would know a thing or two about identifying leaders.

'But we don't talk about the fire in the eyes. We call it the fire in the belly,' said Professor John Harrison, a political analyst from Nanyang Technological University.

Wherever the fire is, it's about spreading it.

'Having a vision is not enough. You need the eyes to communicate the idea,' said Prof Harrison.

'Not everyone might understand what a leader is saying. But if they can feel your passion, they're with you.'

CONFIDENT

Looking someone in the eye tells him you are 'confident and unafraid', said Dr Nair.

It's why you do that at job interviews and first dates.

It's also, Dr Nair pointed out, 'why gangsters get into fights'.

But looks, as they like to say, aren't everything.

'In the course of human interaction, the gaze must be strategically timed,' said Dr Nair.

The look must be given at the 'critical junctures' when the listener's mind hangs in the balance.

You either have it or you don't.

'You can't fake it,' said Mr Martin Cropper, 44, the chief executive officer of No Limits, an organisation that teaches corporate leadership.

But what about an ex-actor-turned-president like Ronald Reagan? Or California's Arnie the Governator?

Could the look be rehearsed or acted?

'There's always a first moment when you can tell if the fire in your eyes is real or not,' said Mr Cropper.

Eyes, said Dr Nair, are the 'body's lie detector machine'.

'People read the eyes, not the smile,' she said.

What does that say, then, about leaders who often hide behind sunglasses, like North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi?

'Maybe they have something to hide,' said Professor Harrison.

But it's not just about the eyes.

Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid is almost blind. So was Shoko Asahara, the leader of Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo responsible for the Sarin gas attack that killed 12 people in Tokyo in 1995.

It's about what Mr Cropper would say, in sleek corporate lingo, 'congruent communication'.

'Everything - your eyes, your voice, your actions - must be aligned with what you are saying,' he said.

After all, a sheepdog doesn't just stare.

It barks and bites, too.

Not even a little bit country

12 Aug 2007, ST

By Tan Hsueh Yun

MUCH as I hate to stereotype people, least of all myself, there are some universal truths you just cannot ignore.

For example, I firmly believe that you're either a dog person or a cat person.

The Tans, my family, are dog people. Mutts or pedigrees, we love them all. We think people who love dogs are good people.

So we got a bit worried when recently, my sister took in an abandoned cat. She started spamming us with photos of said cat (I don't want to know its name). On phone calls, she'd describe its antics in too much detail.

We are not amused and have decided to stage an intervention. Mei has strayed, but she will be brought back to the fold.

Just like I reeled myself in recently, when I thought that maybe I could be a country person.

You see, I also believe that you're either a city person or a country person.

I'm the former. I like that restaurants stay open late, that I can watch a movie almost anytime I want, that I can go to Mustafa and buy a frying pan at 3am.

But I've also been watching British TV personalities Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall extol the virtues of country living in their programmes on cable television.

Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose River Cottage series is shown on the Asian Food Channel (StarHub Channel 69), went from stressed out city chef to growing his own vegetables and raising his own animals for food in Dorset.

Oliver's latest cooking show on Discovery Travel & Living (StarHub Channel 16), Jamie At Home, is set in his country home. He cooks just the most delicious-looking food using produce he grows with the help of a gardener.

It all looks so idyllic and peaceful. So desirable and doable.

I spun an elaborate fantasy involving an outdoor pizza oven, vegetable and herb gardens, and many, many trees. I pictured myself becoming a calm person. Fit and strong from all that gardening. Happy as a lark.

Of course, footage of some guys salting raw pork in the River Cottage bathtub freaked me out a little. There were also all those bugs crawling on and out of Oliver's vegetables. But I continued dreaming about retirement someplace far from the madding crowd.

The bucolic bubble burst when wild kingdom descended on my flat two weeks ago.

I left a bunch of bananas on the kitchen counter on a Thursday night and got a shock the next morning. Two had holes in them. Something had eaten into my fruit.

In a move that showed I have no future as a crime scene investigator, I panicked and dumped the whole bunch in the rubbish chute. I should, of course, have bagged it, tagged it and taken it to a lab.

At work, I couldn't stop thinking about it and worked myself up into a frenzy. What critters were hiding in my flat? Was there a swarm of something somewhere? I conveniently forgot that my flat is the size of a postage stamp with no place for anything to hide.

Worse, a colleague kept going on about baby mice busting in from either of the flats next door. All they need is a crack, he says with great authority.

A sane friend tells me this is impossible. 'Ignore him. It's not Die Hard.'

Okay, but what ate my bananas?

I got my answer that night. I was watching television when I thought I heard something flapping behind me. I turned and there was a brown bird in the middle of the dining room. I was so shocked I yelped in horror and it flew back out.

What kind of bird flies around at 2am, I wondered. Maybe it was a fruit bat. Bats! In my flat! I closed all the windows and went to sleep, feeling uneasy.

The next morning, I found a beetle on the kitchen floor the size of a coffee bean. A moth also flew in and taunted me by fluttering right in front of me.

Then the bird tried to get in again. Was it because I had a cheesecake cooling on the counter? I let out another startled yelp. It flew away but later, hovered just outside the window. I moved the cake to the living room, where I could eyeball it.

I don't know why I was suddenly invaded by all these creatures. Perhaps Al Gore's inconvenient truth cannot be ignored anymore.

But what I realise now is that someone who's borderline obsessive about neatness and order, and who hates dealing with critters that are not dogs, has no business dreaming country dreams.

My friend says I should hang up a picture of a cat near the window to scare the bird away.

Tell me, what's a dog person to do?

Taking the plunge

12 Aug 2007, ST

To test how far a woman should go in exposing her cleavage in the workplace, I embarked on a 'social experiment' last week

By Sumiko Tan

I'M NOT what you'd call repressed or a prude, but I do think a woman should not show off her cleavage when she's at work.

It's distracting to male colleagues, offensive to fellow females, and it just makes you appear unprofessional.

But let me clarify that by cleavage I mean those heaving, in-your-face Gong Li ones as seen in the recent Zhang Yimou film, Curse Of The Golden Flower.

If it's just a sliver of a valley caused by the bunching up of the intermammary sulcus (which I found out is the anatomical term for the area between the breasts), well, it happens to the best of us.

The reason I'm writing about this is the media flap caused by Hillary Clinton's cleavage.

Last month, Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan wrote a column about how Mrs Clinton had appeared in the Senate wearing a rose-coloured blazer over a black top.

'The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape... There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable,' she said.

Givhan went on to discuss Mrs Clinton's style choices over the years (nothing remotely sexy), and wondered if the show of cleavage was the presidential hopeful's 'request to be engaged in a particular way'.

She concluded: 'To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d'oeuvres is a provocation.'

Not surprisingly, howls of protest followed. Readers said it was insulting to Mrs Clinton to be discussing her breasts; women were outraged by how females were once again being objectified (do body parts of male politicians wearing tight pants ever get scrutinised?)

It all made interesting reading and got me wondering: How far should a woman go in exposing her cleavage in the workplace?

I DID a straw poll of men and women in my office.

Of the six women I asked, all said that what Mrs Clinton wore was perfectly acceptable at work.

'The flash of cleavage strikes me as more of a genuine wardrobe malfunction - or lack of a decent stylist - than any sudden deliberate move to show a softer, more feminine side of Mrs Clinton... unless she was giving an early V for Victory signal for her electoral campaign,' one quipped.

On what should be permissible in the office, two felt that women should always dress modestly, while four said that exposing a hint of cleavage was fine.

'Accidental' exposure - like when a woman stoops down to pick up something - can be 'quite sexy and alluring', said one.

Another could live with a colleague exposing 'the start of the valley or one-sixth of the cup'.

Yet another was more generous: 'Exposing half the breast is not appropriate for the office but a quarter is about right.'

The fourth woman pointed out that 'how much' is relative: 'If the cleavage is mountainous then the woman should put it away as it could look vulgar. If she has peaks only the size of Bukit Timah Hill, I think it's okay.'

But all six were adamant that it was professional suicide to deliberately flaunt your chest and gain a reputation as Office Cleavage Queen.

'Such women are just pandering to the male ego and allowing men to be in a superior position to judge them based on their looks and nothing else,' said one.

Another noted: 'It's really uncomfortable if you are at a meeting and a fellow female flaunts her assets.

'You notice all the men's eyes swivel to the heaving embonpoint, then quickly swivel away, then sneak back again. It alters the whole tone of a meeting and shifts the focus from the business at hand. It becomes all about the bust and the lust - the real powerpoint.'

The six men I polled were perhaps understandably more generous in what they deemed permissible.

Five said a little titillation was harmless.

'Of course all we men want to see cleavage but in a way that will not embarrass us, and more critically, the woman concerned,' one said.

'So I think a woman, if she is daring enough, should just titillate a bit, maybe a button undone on a blouse and definitely not with bra showing.'

Said another: 'A little peek is good, not in a lecherous way, but because it makes her more feminine. It's feminine power dressing and everyone listens to a woman who's not afraid to show off her femininity.

'But if the female worker starts pouring out her assets and it goes to the extent that male workers start thinking of the Grand Canyon or of innovative pen-holders, then the line has definitely been crossed.'

IN THE name of social experiment, I decided to show cleavage at the office last Tuesday to see if people reacted differently to me.

Now, this was not an easy assignment because a) I'm not generally prone to flashing my cleavage b) I'm a woman of, alas, suboptimal cleavage c) my desk faces the full blast of the air-conditioner and I could catch a cold.

But, ah well, anything for you, dear reader.

So I donned a spangly gold spaghetti top with a V neckline that plunged 15cm from the hollow of my collar bone.

With help from a Maximizer bra (it worked!), I achieved a reasonable cleavage, though nothing va-va-voom.

It's a look I'd wear on a holiday but definitely not the sort of neckline I'd display at work. It did feel a little draughty though, so I wore a cardigan (unbuttoned) over it.

Before I set off, I got my mother's okay. She said I looked 'all right' but added for good measure: 'Sometimes, covered-up is more sexy.'

Female colleagues noticed I looked different, although none mentioned my chest directly.

One said: 'Oh, what a nice blouse you're wearing.' Another: 'You look like you're going clubbing tonight.' A third: 'Your top looks very Eighties.' But I wondered what they were really thinking.

The men? Maybe male journalists are a blase breed but no one batted an eyelid. Which was good, of course, although admittedly a teeny bit bruising to my ego.

Then I went to get lunch at Junction 8 in Bishan, and let's just say the men there who stared made no effort not to.

Showing off cleavage, I realised, made me feel both empowered and embarrassed.

I felt empowered with men. If just a little thing like this can command their attention, how silly and weak men must really be, I thought.

With women, I felt embarrassed and apologetic. I'm just not into one-upmanship, anatomical or in other areas, and a beautiful cleavage is indeed a weapon a woman can thrust to her advantage when around men, at work and at play.

But the biggest lesson I got from the experiment was this: It's just too emotionally tiring to be playing games in the office. Worse, it distracts you from the real reason you go there - to put in an honest day's work for the pay you get.

I was glad when Tuesday ended and I could go back to my more modest work clothes.

As my mother said, covered-up can be sexy, too.

It's all about how confident and happy you feel inside, and how you project that outside. Really.

Why you fall truly, madly, deeply in love

12 Aug 2007, ST

It's hard to follow your heart when it's really the brain that controls the rules of attraction

HER front brain is telling her he's trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He's never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can't hold down a job.

But her middle brain won't listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he's so bad he's good.

His front brain is lecturing, too: She's flirting with every guy in the place, it says. His mid-brain is distracted by her legs, her blouse and her come-hither stare.

'What could you be thinking?' their front brains demand.

Their middle brains, each on a quest for reward, pay no heed.

Alas, when it comes to choosing mates, smart neurons can make dumb choices.

Sure, if the brain's owner is in her 40s and has been around the block a few times, she might grab her bag and scram. If the guy has reached seasoned middle age, he might think twice about that cleavage-baring temptress. Wisdom, at least a little, does come with experience.

But if the objects of desire are in their 20s, all bets are off.

A lot will depend on the influence of Mum and Dad's marriage, the gossip and urging of friends, and whether life experience have convinced these two brains that what they're looking at is attractive. She just might sidle over to Mr Wrong and bat her eyes. And he could well give in to temptation.

And so the dance of attraction, infatuation and, ultimately love, begins. It's a dance that holds many mysteries to psychologists as well as to the willing participants.

Science is just beginning to parse the inner workings of the brain in love, examining the blissful or ruinous fall from a medley of perspectives: neural systems, chemical messengers and the biology of reward.

Love revelation

IT WAS only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI.

The images they got are thought to be science's first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs.

The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

All animals mate: The most primitive system in the brain, one that even reptiles have, knows it needs to reproduce. Turtles do it but then lay their eggs in the sand and head back to sea, never seeing their mate again.

Human brains are considerably more complicated, with additional neural systems that seek romance, others that want comfort and companionship, and others that are just out for a roll in the hay.

Yet the chemistry between two people isn't just a matter of molecules careening around the brain. Attraction also involves personal history.

'Our parents have an effect on us,' says Helen Fisher, evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies human attraction.

'So does the school system, television, timing, mystery.'

Love, that one small word, stands for a hotchpotch of feelings and drives: lust, romance, passion, attachment, commitment and contentment.

The dance that leads, if we're lucky, to a stable commitment moves through several key steps.

First comes initial attraction, the spark. If someone's going to pick one person out of the billions of opposite-sex humans out there, it's this step that starts things rolling.

Next comes the wild, dizzying infatuation of romance - a unique magic between two people who can't stop thinking about each other. The brain uses its chemical arsenal to focus our attention on one person, forsaking all others.

'It's the love potion No. 9, the click factor, interpersonal chemistry,' says Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony Labs.

The passion lasts for at least a few months, two to four years tops, says relationship researcher Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

As it fades, something more stable takes over: the steady pair-bonding of what's called companionate love.

It's a heartier variety, characterised by tenderness, affection and stability over the long haul. Far less is known about the brains of people celebrating their silver anniversaries or more, but researchers are beginning to recruit such couples to find out.

Facing the facts

THE forces of attraction are in many ways mysterious, but scientists know certain things.

Studies have shown that women prefer men with symmetrical faces and that men like a certain waist-to-hip ratio in their mates. One study even found that women, when they sniffed men's T-shirts, were attracted to certain kinds of body odours.

That initial spark can flash and fade. Or it can become a flame and then a fire, a rush of exhilaration, yearning, hunger and sense of complete union that scientists know as passionate love.

Key to this state of seeing a person as a soulmate instead of a one-night stand is the limbic system, nestled deep within the brain between the neocortex (the region responsible for reason and intellect) and the reptilian brain (responsible for primitive instincts).

Altered levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin - neurotransmitters also associated with arousal - wield their influence.

But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. 'It's a drive to win life's greatest prize, the right mating partner,' Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction.

People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.

Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.

In an experiment published as a chapter in a 2006 book, Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience, Fisher found 17 people who were in relationships for an average of seven months.

She knew they were in love from their answers to what researchers call the Passionate Love Scale. They all said they'd feel deep despair if their lover left, and they yearned to know all there was to know about the loved one.

She put these lovesick, enraptured people in an fMRI to see what areas of their brains got active when they saw a photograph of their beloved ones.

'We found some remarkable things,' she said. 'We saw activity in the ventral tegmental area and other regions of the brain's reward system associated with motivation, elation and focused attention.'

It's the same part of the brain that presumably is active when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or when gamblers think they're going to win the lottery.

No wonder it's as hard to say no to the feeling of romantic arousal as it would be to say no to a windfall in the millions. The brain has seen what it wants, and it's going to get it.

'At that point, you really wouldn't notice if he had three heads,' Fisher says. 'Or you'd notice, but you'd choose to overlook it.'

Other studies also suggest that the brain in the first throes of love is much like a brain on drugs.

Lucy Brown, professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has also taken fMRI images of people in the early days of a new love.

In a study reported in the July 2005, Journal of Neurophysiology, she, too, found key activity in the ventral tegmental area.

'That's the area that's also active when a cocaine addict gets an IV injection of cocaine,' she says. 'It's not a craving. It's a high.'

You see someone, you click, and you're euphoric. And in response, your ventral tegmental area uses chemical messengers such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin to send signals racing to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens with the good news, telling it to start craving.

'The other person becomes a goal in your life,' Brown says. He or she becomes a goal you might die without. That one person begins to stand out as the one and only.

Biologically, the cravings and pleasure unleashed are as strong as any drug.

Surely such a goal is worth taking risks for, and other alterations in the brain help ensure that the lovelorn will do just that. Certain regions, scientists have found, are being deactivated, such as within the amygdala, associated with fear.

'That's why you can do such insane things when you're in love,' Fisher says. 'You would never otherwise dream of driving across the country in 13 hours, but for love, you would.'

Sooner or later, excited brain messages reach the caudate nucleus, a dopamine-rich area where unconscious habits and skills, such as the ability to ride a bike, are stored.

The attraction signal turns the love object into a habit, and then an obsession.

According to a 1999 study in the journal Psychological Medicine, people newly in love have serotonin levels 40 per cent lower than normal people do - just like people with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Experiments in other mammals add to the human chemical findings.

Female prairie voles, for example, develop a distinct preference for a specific male after mating, and the preference is associated with a 50 per cent increase in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.

But when the monogamous vole is injected with a dopamine antagonist, blocking the activity of the chemical, she'll readily dump her partner for another.

Chemistry counts

THE front brain certainly gets involved as it ponders all of life's experiences and past mistakes, researchers say - but not just the front brain.

The nucleus accumbens, virtual swamp of dopamine that it is, is also holder of memories. Its quest for reward is influenced by childhood experiences, friends, previous failed engagements or the jerk who cheated on you.

And, as it happens, practical matters like whether a couple both like pina coladas do matter in igniting passionate love.

A research project headed by eHarmony Labs' Gonzaga interviewed 1,200 dating and newlywed couples. The results, reported in the July issue of The Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, found that those who reported similar interests and feelings were more satisfied.

'Those who reported chemistry said they felt at ease, relaxed, connected. They knew they had some things in common,' he says. 'Chemistry is more than just being hot or handsome.'

The free fall of love's first rush can happen at any age, whether people are 20 or 70, says Elaine Hatfield, psychology professor at the University of Hawaii.

What differs is that the older people get, the more memories they harbour of joy and trust, rejection and disappointment. And as people learn from experience, the front brain, with its logic and reason, probably gets a greater say.

'When you are young, passion and hope are so strong that's it's almost impossible to stop loving someone,' Hatfield says. 'After you've been kicked around by life, however, you start to have a dual response to handsome con men: 'Wow!' and 'Arrrrrrgh!''

Somehow, it all comes together, for better or for worse, the sum total of what's found in the mating dance of the ancient reptilian brain, the passion of the limbic brain and the logic of the neocortex.

Oh, what a ride.

LAT

Cute or not?

12 Aug 2007, ST

Teens get thrills from joining online cuties' clubs; it's an ugly experience for those rejected

By Melody Zaccheus

SINGAPOREAN youth are putting themselves under the scrutiny of strangers by posting pictures of themselves on Internet rating communities in order to get stamped as 'cute' or 'hot'.

Frequent flaming and online squabbles have not stopped these communities from swelling.

Undergraduate Valerie Lim, 22, recently posted her pictures on Asian Cuties, a rating community on blogging portal Livejournal.com.

Like most rating communities based in the US, Asian Cuties (www.community.livejournal.com/ asiancuties) requires wannabes to fill out a form stating their personal details and describing their interests.

The online application must come complete with pictures as well. Upon submission, applicants will have to wait for members to give a stamp of approval or a shake of the head.

On Asian Cuties, a person needs just more than half of at least 20 votes before he or she is stamped a 'cutie'.

Freelance model Valerie's application, which included photos ranging from studio modelling shots to casual, self-taken shots with her friends and boyfriend, was well-received by the site's members.

They complimented her 'strong facial bone structure', 'hot bod' and 'nice stomach'.

Valerie was excited and flattered by the comments she received as well as the fact that all 23 voters gave her the nod of approval.

'I was rather apprehensive about my application initially, but as the compliments came in, I was gradually relieved of my worry,' she said.

'The community's stamp of approval sort of boosted my ego too.'

She added: 'The good thing about such sites is that it enables you to find out what people think of you because sometimes, how you view yourself is very different from how others view you.'

Nanyang Polytechnic student Evon Chng, 19, was also accepted as an Asian Cutie with a perfect score from 21 voters.

She said: 'I wouldn't mind receiving criticism as long as it is constructive. That said, I've yet to receive any negative comments.'

But it is not all praise for every applicant. Two recent applications by Singaporean teens have received a lot of flak.

Critical and offensive remarks posted on one 17-year-old's application included a description of her application as 'complete s***'. One member even went on to call her an 'ugly little girl'.

The 17-year-old decided to fight back, so she responded to fellow Singaporean and voter Valerie Lim by saying that she was 'possibly a million times cuter' than the freelance model who had given her the thumbs down.

She continued in self-defence: 'I'm not really serious about this application. I just want to see how the masses respond to my application.'

On another teenager's post, a member did not hold back on her criticism either. Her harsh comment for the 18-year-old junior college student was: 'You look like you're 12 or 13. Actually you kind of look like a little boy too.'

In response to a male member who gave her a 'definite no' vote, stating that her application was just 'bleagh', she replied: 'Thanks for looking anyway. I hope no vomiting was caused.'

Both of the heavily slammed applicants did not respond to e-mail and comments left on their blogs when contacted.

Even though 19-year-old Selena Soh did not have it so hard, she still had to go through a deluge of negative criticism before she finally received members' approval.

Battling insulting comments from five members who complained about her unplucked eyebrows - some of which went along the lines of 'try fixing your eyebrows' - the Temasek Polytechnic student was annoyed that they were 'picking on superficial things'.

But people are still flocking to such communities, with Asian Cuties amassing 700 members over the past five years.

The number of rating sites have also increased over time. Among the popular ones are Rate My Face, Hot or Not, and doIlikeU.com

Looking for someone? Just Spock his name

08 Aug 2007, ST

SAN FRANCISCO - A US web firm is preparing to launch an ambitious Internet search engine that it hopes will eventually track down the names of the world's six billion people.

Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding a million names per day on the invitation-only, beta version of its website, which will be made available to the public later this month.

'How Google allows you to type anything and gives you a web document result, we give you results around people,' said Spock.com co-founder Jay Bhatti.

The founders of Spock.com hope the website will eventually provide a search result for everyone in the world.

To index individuals, it scours through social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Bebo.

But it also allows web surfers to add information about individuals to help Spock.com compile full profiles.

The website has a system to filter out false information that could destroy its credibility, Mr Bhatti said.

Spock.com, which has secured US$7 million (S$10.6 million) in financing by venture capital firms, will be available for free and will make money through advertising.

The emergence of people search engines has sparked concerns over privacy rights.

Addressing the issue, Mr Bhatti said Spock.com allows a person to have his or her profile removed and ask the website to determine where the information came from.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Should I get a divorce?

08 Aug 2007, ST, Mind Your Body

Wendy Chua K. Wand
for Mind Your Body

The writer is author of All Kids R Gifted, a life coach and founder of Wand Inspiration. Her latest inspirational self-help book is Break To Dawn: New Challenges, New Commitments.

Q I accidentally found my husband browsing photos and e-mail sent by another woman. When I confronted him, he insisted it was all innocent. I insisted on seeing his e-mail mailbox and saw that there were e-mail messages from other women and he had adopted a pseudonym.

I could not believe it, but maybe it explains why he has not been interested in having sex with me for many years. Has he been having affairs to satisfy his sexual needs instead?

In the past, I have confronted him about our lack of a sex life but he always said that his diabetic medication left him with no sexual urge.

I do not doubt his love for the children, but I cannot believe how he has deceived me, his wife. I told my young children that I felt cheated by their father and told them that I was considering seeking a divorce. They pleaded with me not to.

Weeks have passed since I confronted my husband. He chooses to keep quiet, yet is still claiming his innocence. I have no one to turn to, and the situation is affecting my children.

If I opt for a divorce, will I get custody of my children and receive maintenance fees?

Do I have to find a lawyer? How much will the legal fees cost? We are both contributing towards the HDB flat, so what will happen to it? I am really lost.

A Have you actually decided that you want a divorce? You are already asking about your HDB flat and legal fees.

A marriage is more than an HDB flat. And closing down a marriage is more than the price of lawyers and a flat. Before you make a rash decision, step back and reflect for a while.

If you had not discovered those photos, would you say your marriage was good?

It sounds like you were already unhappy with your lack of sex for years. Yet, you have not sought counselling or help to communicate your feelings constructively.

If your husband has difficulty in his sexual performance, he would be feeling very embarrassed and depressed, and even angry. If you were to demand sex from him, or belittle him, that would worsen your relationship with him.

What if he is no longer attracted to you? This is a harsh question which must be addressed. How attractive have you kept yourself - physically and emotionally?

I think that when you found those pictures of other women, your self-esteem got hit badly. You are feeling insecure and inferior to the women in those photos. He may be telling the truth about not having affairs. He may be enjoying the sight of the photos.

Most men are visual - they will look at attractive women. Most men only look, with their integrity keeping them sexually and emotionally faithful to their partners.

Even if he is not having an affair, you feel betrayed because you would expect him to desire no other women but you. You need to deal with your own feelings and communicate them through the right channels.

Since your discovery, you have avoided communicating with him. He is also avoiding talking about it, for his own reasons. Perhaps he is confused, embarrassed, angry, lost himself.

So you end up communicating your hurt to your children. It is not right for you to confide in young children this way.

They are innocent and too young to understand your feelings.

Of course, they would want their parents to stay together. You are planting insecurity in them by telling them your own fears. You are also possibly turning them against their own father. DO NOT USE YOUR CHILDREN AS WEAPONS.

You need to speak to an adult who is neutral and objective. Walk in to a family service centre and ask to see a counsellor. You can go there alone, because you need to know what you really want and to face your own fears. If you find out that you want to save and enrich your marriage, you will find ways to improve yourself and your relationship with your husband.

If you are physically abused, and despite your efforts to save the marriage, your husband is not interested in the marriage, then your counsellor can help you find the strength to move on.

In your soul searching, think of the qualities that you do love about your husband. Think of the qualities you show to him. If he is truly not having affairs, then I strongly advise that you focus on the good parts of your marriage and work to build upon those strengths.

If all you are thinking about is divorce, without thinking through ways of staying married, and improving your marriage, you are jumping the gun.

Perhaps your husband wants you to find those photos, so take that as a sign that you both need to address the problems in your marriage, and to do something to solve those problems.

It is also an opportunity to find the love and strength to set new and better directions for your marriage.